Professor of Computational Cognitive Science | @AI_Radboud | @Iris@scholar.social on 🦣 | http://cognitionandintractability.com | she/they 🏳️🌈
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Not to mention the damage it does To Its Own Users!!! At best, it cultivates dependence and atrophies the mind, at worst it’s literally pushing people into mental health crises. If it was a substance, it would have already been regulated to hell and back, if not outright banned.
The president is sending the military to control American cities and if you're a reporter who's framing that illegal power grab as "pushing the boundaries of constitutionality" or "acting boldly to fight crime" or whatever, please go find another line of work where you won't get us all killed.
2 letters to sign: "Current GenAI technologies represent unacceptable legal, ethical and environmental harms, including exploitative labour, piracy of countless creators' and artists' work, harmful biases, mass production of misinformation, and reversal of the global emissions reduction trajectory."
at scale
Please sign our open letter "Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia" (signing anonymously is possible) https://openletter.earth/open-letter-stop-the-uncritical-adoption-of-ai-technologies-in-academia-b65bba1e
“But some educators are pushing back against the “inevitable” technology, and open letters are becoming one tool of the resistance. (…) In the Netherlands, over 900 educators have signed a letter entitled “Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia.” www.forbes.com/sites/peterg...
Uncritical adoption of AI “undermines our basic pedagogical values and principles of scientific integrity. It prevents us from maintaining our standards of independence & transparency. And most concerning, AI use … hinder[s] learning and deskill critical thought.” openletter.earth/open-letter-...
those who have made this connection and understand its implications are who are most opposed to LLMs invading everything. setting aside what could be done to improve the tech, we're always back to it being a shortcut for thinking.
Case in point irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...
*cracks knuckles* okay so you know how the media has a problem with taking snippets of scientific studies out of context and writing articles which mislead the public? now imagine a computer program is doing that when you ask it questions about scientific literature but also it makes stuff up.
I love this.
Yes it does. Maybe try reading again :)
🔥
No. #AIEthics #JustSayNo
Proton claims their “Lumo” to be a fully open course AI chatbot. Luckily, there is @dingemansemark.bsky.social ’s European Open Source AI Index that makes clear that Lumo is in fact “the least open 'open' model” that they have seen so far. osai-index.eu/news/lumo-pr...
Excellent mansplaining example: a man with a PhD in psychology explains which AI work to a woman who (has a PhD and) researches AI.
She has kindly made all her research openly available on her website. This may be a useful place to start 👇 bsky.app/profile/iris...
You are not missing anything www.youtube.com/shorts/cEk9i...
I guess you may not realize you are speaking to an expert in AI Can warmly recommend reading @olivia.science ‘s work arxiv.org/abs/2507.19960
Sending solidarity! Harrowing to witness our academic institutions hollowing out themselves from the inside while attacked by fascists (from inside and outside). It is heartbreaking. We must resist and reclaim the space. <3
www.youtube.com/shorts/cEk9i...
I would beg for everybody to not accept it's happening as this acceptance is core to the issues, paper out on this soon, can link you 🙃
‘Beperkingen’ soms ook ‘grenzen’ of ‘voorwaarden’. Het is een beetje context afhankelijk. Heb je een voorbeeld zin waarin je het zou willen gebruiken?
Van wetenschapper Robbert Dijkgraaf tot deze👇Gouke Moes... Het staat symbool voor hoe diep ons land inmiddels is gezonken.
Iemand die hakenkruizen heeft gelijkgesteld aan regenboogzebrapaden, wordt de nieuwe Minister van Onderwijs. Het ministerie waar óók emancipatie onder valt en dus gaat over de aanpak van lhbti-discriminatie. Uiteraard gaan we Kamervragen stellen. www.oogtv.nl/2024/09/groo...
1973 anti-cellulite detox duct tape gender expression reverse engineer stressed super-spreader 👀
Cursed like every start of the academic year but extra
In this paper, @olivia.science Radically Redefines AI as any relationship between humans and artifacts “where it appears as if cognitive labour is offloaded onto such artifacts”. She distinguishes 3 types of relationship: AI that “replaces, enhances, or displaces cognition”. See Table 1 below. 2/n
"To even begin to de-fetishise AI, we must look the human-in-the-loop in the eyes." 🔥🔥🔥
💫 Just out! A tour de force by my colleague @olivia.science, new paper 📝: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? 🧮 ⏰ 🧠 Keywords: AI; cognitive science; sociotechnical relationship; cognitive labour; ANN; technology; cognition; human-centred AI Link to the paper on arXiv: lnkd.in/e9nHGkMK 1/n
time to boost @olivia.science's paper again
" we must look the human-in-the-loop in the eyes"
I already left science once. And it's very clear that some people around me know how hard it is while others actively contribute because let's be honest there's no neutrality here. Certain people profit by pushing us down or allowing others to. To the cool people who protect and support: thanks. 1/
We have updated our post. Will you update your marketing materials to tone down the open-washing? osai-index.eu/news/lumo-pr... #OpenWashing
Credentialism has been the word of my year on the job market. I knew that credentials were no guarantee of success, that they're more of an adversarial shield - you might not say yes, but you can't say no to me on this basis. I did not expect them to mean nothing & to constantly hear about "fit".
🧵 👇
This thread is important for everyone in the academy to read. Many of our colleagues have a dramatically different experience because systematic biases still exist.
StopGenAI.com updates! Front page updated with archive of @irisvanrooij.bsky.social's AI slop and the destruction of knowledge. How to avoid Gen AI page updated with crucial Firefox AI avoidance tip: stopgenai.com/how-to-avoid...
Here is a gift link. I know people have feelings about the times but this is free and reading this should make you very very mad and then you should do something:
Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be
It is not us, but our male colleagues who should be ashamed, for benefiting from sexism and enabling systemic harm day after day after day bsky.app/profile/hist...
bsky.app/profile/iris...
Academia still hates women. But we resist! Solidarity with all women in academia who face everyday sexism, erasure, harassment etc. and with all who were pushed out 💔❤️
The way I relate to this skeet... It's a complicated feeling because you still have a job, you're so lucky! But treated like garbage over and over and over, constantly remaking your career and redefining success. All at a place that doesn't actually want you!
Still impossible being a woman in academia, can confirm
Some of the brightest lights I’ve known have been forced to eat shit repeatedly in their careers. And they were the “lucky” ones—in that they were able to stay in the game. Many more just got completely pushed out and we never know about them except as faceless statistics.
There are more women academics—then and now—who go through this than I realized at the start of my career. Most don’t talk about it openly because they’re ashamed they weren’t able to beat the system, even though it was rigged against them.
I remember speaking to Prof. Rossiter at a conference around the time she retired. She was gracious and keenly interested in the work younger scholars were doing, in a genuinely curious way that you often don’t see from senior scholars of some reknown. She will definitely be missed.
“In the late 1960s, Dr. Rossiter was working on her Ph.D. at Yale, when a comment from one of her male professors puzzled her. Who, she had asked, were the women in science? There were none, he said. Another professor mumbled something about Marie Curie being the exception.”🙃
This is a great piece! It was not on my radar until you shared it in the reply above. Thanks for doing so, I learnt a great deal from it.
Thank you so very much for saying that! (This piece took a while to find its final form... it was a heartfelt piece, aiming to get Mary Hesse back on the map, and clarify the reason why we seem to loose so many women thinkers throughout history.)
Not unaware. @proton.me knows privacy and FOSS concerns are key to its userbase; their users have pointed out the wrong claims from day 1, yet Proton has doubled down, saying (astonishingly) the statement merely reflects a "long-term intention" 😂 discuss.privacyguides.net/t/proton-mar...
Kantians must be stopped.
Israël hoort tot landen die proberen onze ‘publieke opinie en politieke besluitvorming naar hun hand te zetten’ net als bv Rusland. Vb: reactie na Maccabi-rellen. Israël maakte een document met valse informatie over Nederlanders die banden zouden hebben met Hamas; vd Plas kwam ermee in Tweede Kamer.
Industry lies are always so funny like anything they say is always literally the opposite
Follow up to my little rage outburst yesterday about Proton making it impossible not to interact with their new "feature". They are also lying about it being Open Source. Like they are lying about other aspects of their business being Open Source. @davidgerard.co.uk did a video on this a month ago.
Proton - the company that boasts user privacy and security as a major feature now have an AI chatbot. Who’s to say where exactly their training data came from….
Misleading marketing @proton.me
Disappointed in Proton, esp. for a company where privacy is part of their brand,
typo: open *source
Proton claims their “Lumo” to be a fully open course AI chatbot. Luckily, there is @dingemansemark.bsky.social ’s European Open Source AI Index that makes clear that Lumo is in fact “the least open 'open' model” that they have seen so far. osai-index.eu/news/lumo-pr...
Oh indeed. I read it several times, yesterday. It resonates with what I wrote a few years ago about actively writing women scholar lineages to stop the constant collective forgetting: aeon.co/essays/why-a...
We ban pens & use pencils early on at least when I was a kid & only were allowed calculators much later. It's all so messed up. We can only tackle it if we break it up for the brainwashed. Each bad argument strand needs to be picked apart cos people are not able to see the big picture, ironically.
"This reframing of the issue reverberated with the experiences of women faculty across the nation, creating an atmosphere of impatience and putting the establishment, temporarily at least, on the defensive." p. 269 Does it sound familiar to you twenty years later? 11/11
"..though that continued to exist, to the qualitative or personal appeal of the mistreatment of senior women, the survivors at the end of that extraordinarily long “pipeline” (Why so lonely? or Why so isolated?). 10/n
"At the peak of their careers they were isolated, powerless, and almost invisible. Their male colleagues worked around them, as if they were not there. They had[] not to notice that they were not part of the inner circle that chaired departments and search committees, 4/n
"Having been treated unequally for years, they had accepted the situation and only now were realizing and admitting that they were marginalized and miserable. " 3/n
"the seventeen faculty members who had earned tenure in its School of Science, did not enjoy the status and power that should come with their professorships." 2/n
From the epilogue in Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World since 1972. The order is mine. "In March 1999 a report was posted on the MIT website that revealed that even its top women, ½n
We need a term, a logo, some clear branding, to show products and projects are clean of slop.
I think it was me who needed coffee to not post nonsense links 😅 ☕️
I do recommending the obituary in the quoted post bsky.app/profile/moni...
I think that link is an autocorrect mistake on my word “too”. Was surprised to see a link, as I put none there 🙂
“She also detailed the strategy of “credentialism,” by which women hoped that if they accrued enough credentials, their gender became irrelevant. (It did not.)” In my experience my gender became more relevant the higher I got in the academic hierarchy. Misogynist attacks get worse too
Reminds me of the entomologist Evelyn Cheesman who, two generations earlier worked unpaid at the Natural History Museum, borrowing male colleagues' microscopes in their lunch breaks. She still discovered more than 200 species and theorised early ideas around plate tectonics.
Here's a #GiftLink for those who want to read the full NYT obit of historian of science & gender, Margaret Rossiter. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s... #histSTM 🧪🗃️
Rossiter coined the term "Matilda effect" for when women's scientific work is attributed to men. It was a twist on the "Matthew effect," famously attributed to Robert Merton, but actually studied jointly by Merton and his wife Harriet Zuckerman, who was denied co-authorship
"If your supply chain uses AI coding, you should assume it’s dangerous trash put out by morons. If any of your upstream dependencies has a .cursor folder, you need to assume they’re not competent, and remove that dependency pronto."
Really hope students understand why this is not a matter of not polluting, not using slave labour — say there could be AI models that are more or less not doing that, even though it's impossible — but of actually the whole of human self-expression at stake, so pointless to come to class otherwise.
Something I hinged on to get to this what I describe: the Marxian fetishisation of artefacts is so complete in the case of AI that not only do we somehow conclude machines think, but we accept for them to think, speak, draw instead of us, while also thinking these are (expressions of) our thoughts.
„This is the enduring lesson of Weimar: extremism never triumphs on its own. It succeeds because others enable it—because of their ambition, because of their fear, or because they misjudge the dangers of small concessions.“ www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/hitl...
The sad thing is that there is an urgent need (politically, socially) for exactly this kind of interdisciplinary work in an age where fascists and authoritarians thrive across the world; to challenge the rampant disinformation. But it requires respect on both, all, sides.
"Interdisciplinary" means collaborating across disciplinary boundaries--not swanning in without doing the reading or consulting existing experts.
"Being in a colonizing discipline first demands and then encourages an attitude that might be called intellectual hubris." Turkle, Sherry (1984). The second self: Computers and the human spirit
My students, who attend a working-class rust-belt college, openly talk abt how much they hate AI & are afraid of its consequences. I wonder how much of the oft-reported student enthusiasm for the tech is the merely result of the NYT’s Ivy League bias
Een manier om te zeggen: “ik zit in een hype bubble” Bakker verkoopt hier gebakken lucht. Maar goed, velen met hem en natuurlijk zeker bij Google DeepMind. Hier het hele stuk van @laurensvhg.bsky.social: www.volkskrant.nl/tech/nederla... Lees daarna vooral ook: www.beste-id.nl/salon/denken...
Deadline 10/1: Asst./assoc. prof. (tenure track/tenured), Psychology w/ research (and ideally some teaching) using computation with a focus on AI, Dept. Psychology, Tufts Univ. apply.interfolio.com/172807
If you are also worried about ScienceDirect’s AI slop feature, you can directly contact them here: service.elsevier.com/app/answers/...
I now wrote about this, including the communication with ScienceDirect, on my blog bsky.app/profile/iris...
💯
the appearance of gen AI slop alongside this moment is just too perfect. it provides one of the big missing pieces of fascism that was absent from trump 1 in terms of reactionary modernism
Iff and when it is needed! "Champion a needs‑based approach to digitalisation in education, where technology serves clear pedagogical purposes defined by teachers, students, academics, and researchers—not by profit-led industry marketing cycles."
Education is a public good, an intrinsic element of the social contract, not a marketplace. Technology must serve students and educators—not corporate shareholders. Europe must lead by example, ensuring that digital transformation upholds human dignity, equality, and democracy. 👉https://t.ly/uzrvr
We’re being governed by monsters. Just absolute monsters.
More on the AI death cult that think fiction is science: "The rejection of formal education, with these men abandoning university studies, so touted in the "self-made man" propaganda they peddle about themselves, has deprived them of essential information about history, biology, chemistry, physics"
It is really terrible how these practices are hollowing our academia. You may appreciate our open letter (and can sign if you want to support) openletter.earth/open-letter-...
Anyway, I designed this poster for our coworking space today, and added a subtle(ish) anti-AI dig, haha 💙 ✍️
"A student who cuts and pastes a history paper is enrolled in a cutting and pasting class, not a history class. If the student’s preferred working methods reduce mental effort, we have to reintroduce that effort somehow." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...